A Trussell Trust food bank. The charity has called on the public to donate to their local food bank during the summer holidays.
Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA

It was around January this year that Sid Taylor first began to notice that children attending the youth club where he worked in Salford were going hungry. “They’d tell us they hadn’t eaten all day and we realised that it was a need in the local area,” he said.

Staff at the club, in Little Hulton, started offering the children eggs or beans on toast, often paying for it out of their own pocket. “I got my slow cooker out and started making stews and they loved it,” said Taylor. “I realised we were getting them to eat really healthy things, things 12-year-olds would normally turn up their noses at.”

Taylor’s experience of feeding his own three children helped him realise that local parents who relied on free school meals would need help during school holidays. He founded Snack Shack, a pilot scheme to feed children over the summer months, which the council has described as the city’s first food bank for young people. It takes donations from the local Tesco and from the public, and the club provides activities such as cooking lessons and nail art demonstrations, as well as free, healthy meals.

In 2017 just over 7,000 primary and secondary school children in Salford were eligible for free school meals. Lisa Stone, a local councillor, said holiday hunger was a huge problem in the city. “If [school lunches] are the only substantial meal they get in the day then you can understand why parents dread school holidays,” she said.

Snack Shack is one of an increasing number of services set up across the country with the help of local authorities, charities and volunteers to deal with the problem of holiday hunger.

The Trussell Trust, an anti-poverty charity, has called on the public to donate to their local food bank during the summer break as demand increases. It released figures from its network of food banks showing that a rise in food bank use over the summer last year was driven by a spike in demand among children.

The Atherton & Leigh food bank in Wigan provides food to a holiday club at the Dorset Road community centre, which feeds around 60 children each day. Warren Done, the food bank’s manager, said demand for food during the holidays was growing and other holiday hunger projects had asked them for help.

“We don’t want this to become the norm but that’s the way it’s going,” he said. “The cost of living has gone up, wages are stagnant and jobs are harder to come by in this area. It’s an old mining village. Also, universal credit has kicked in and that’s had a big impact.”

Though parents often opt to come to the food bank without their children, to protect them from what some feel is a humiliating experience, the service is set up to be as child-friendly as possible, with toys on hand to provide a distraction. The room is decked out like a cafe, with colourful tablecloths and flowers on every table.

“I had a women in yesterday who was very emotional,” said Done. “She’d just been put on universal credit and it’ll be six weeks before she gets any money. So she’ll get her money on the first week the kids are back at school and she’s panicking because she can’t afford the uniforms.”

In Hartlepool, 4,689 children accessed support from the council’s Filling the Holiday Gap project last year, a high number in a local authority area of 92,000 people. Steven Carter, a health improvement practitioner with the council, said that although its budgets were stretched the local authority had decided to put aside £70,000 to tackle the problem.

“It’s in order to ensure that we don’t then see the knock-on effect of this in later years. We don’t want families to get into even more of a crisis and resort to harmful and dangerous means of accessing support – like using loans sharks or parents themselves going hungry in order to feed their kids.”

Done said donations to the food bank always dropped in summer when people were away on holiday. “Around September and October it’s harvest time, so we know we’re going to get lots of food in because all the schools and churches collect. At Christmas people are more giving and there is a lot in the papers about the cold weather and the cost of heating,” he said. “When you get to summer there’s a loss of interest.”

Last week the Department for Education announced £2m of funding for initiatives that support families during the holidays, from activities for children to free meals.

Lindsay Graham, a policy adviser who specialises in child food poverty, said the announcement was a good start but “we’re not even off the blocks”. She pointed out that Glasgow city council alone had devoted £2m to tackling the problem.

Last year Frank Field, the Labour MP for Birkenhead, put before parliament a bill to place a legal duty on local authorities to ensure the provision of free meals and activities. The bill was withdrawn after the government made a commitment to look at the issue.

Graham said the US federal government had been running a holiday meals programme for 40 years. “We’re fast catching up with the US when it comes to food insecurity,” she said.

She criticised the government for failing to conduct research into the scale of the problem. “They need to find out how big this is. You can’t tackle a problem until you know how big it is.”